


Transition

by Haberdasher



Series: Twitch Plays Pokemon [18]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Twitch Plays Pokemon (Let's Play)
Genre: Gen, Trans, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Twitch Plays Black 2, Twitch Plays Blaze Black 2, Twitch Plays Pokemon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 08:23:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2844431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cly's journey to discovering and embracing her status as a trans girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Transition

Years before she knew the reason why, Clay was always a bit different from the other boys.

She played with the soldier dolls she owned, but was as likely to put them in tutus as to have them fighting one another. She covered her toy cars in sequins and glitter, infuriating her mother by getting glitter all over as the cars raced across the floor.

And, from the very beginning, she hung out with the other girls, ignoring the rumors that she had cooties or that she’d been seen kissing a friend in the playground. What was so wrong with hanging out with girls, honestly? Clay didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Clay always loved growing her hair out, having it get in her face and blow in the wind, and protested when her mother made her get a hair cut, claiming that boys weren’t supposed to have long hair. And, admittedly, none of the other boys in the neighborhood had long hair, and neither did the boys in those colorfully-illustrated books she pored over. The only ones that ever had long hair were the princesses- Rapunzel with hair long enough to climb, Sleeping Beauty with hair coming down to her dress. And they were beautiful. She read those fairy tales again and again, wondering why the princesses were always the ones captured by dragons and stuck in a tower, why the princes were always the ones to come to their rescue.

As Clay grew older, as the other girls abandoned her one by one because they didn’t like hanging out with a boy, as she was forced into playdates with Humor because her mother thought she needed a guy friend, she retreated into her books, buying more and more until her bookshelves were practically overflowing. There were whole worlds in every book, and when she was reading she didn’t have to think about her lack of friends or her mixed feelings towards Humor or why something about her life just seemed  _off_. She could flee into a place where everything made sense, where every character was her friend, where they went on the wild adventures that she knew she could never bear in real life.

She spent rather a lot of time on the computer, too, despite her mother’s insistence that staring at a glowing screen all day would hurt her eyes, that she needed to go out and play with the other kids and get some fresh air. Clay played games, trying out female and male avatars alike, making up extravagant backstories to tell her Internet friends rather than admit she was just a lowly homebody of a boy who just liked playing as girl characters. When her online friends found out- and somehow, they always ended up finding out- they accused her of being a pervert who just liked staring at a girl character’s ass all day. Those accusations hurt every time, not just because they usually led to these friends refusing to talk to her, but because she  _did_ find a strange sort of pleasure in playing as a girl, though she didn’t think it was quite like that.

As she moved on from video games to forums, after reading up in books and on websites about how genders weren’t as simple as they might appear, she came across the term “transgender”, and everything just clicked. Her life, her whole weird inexplicable life, made so much more sense after reading up on what that meant. But then, once she realized why she’d never quite thought of herself as a boy, a whole new set of challenges approached.

She found a new set of sites to examine: baby name generators. On the rare chance somebody noticed this new obsession, she explained it away as being for her writing, that she was trying to think of names for her characters. And she did write, stories where the princes were the ones in trouble and the princesses were the ones saving the day, stories she shoved into a drawer whenever anybody came over because she had a deep fear that visitors would discover the meaning behind her sudden fascination with writing heroines.

Finally, tentatively, she got around to broaching the topic with those she cared about most.

It started with Humor. Though they’d been forced together at first, they’d grown to be good friends, sharing a world of memories and inside jokes that nobody else could ever understand. If she could trust anybody to keep this secret, it would be him.

They were sitting down on a couch one day, playing one of their favorite fighting games. Clay was winning, of course; she always did. Once the round ended, rather than moving on to the next one, she turned to face her friend.

"Humor?"

He met her glance. “Yeah?”

"What if I were-"  _Was_ , she longed to say, all too aware that this possibility no longer dwelled in the hypothetical. “-a girl?”

Humor grinned, that big toothy grin he always gave when they were joking around. “Well, I bet they’d all think we were dating, for one.”

"But would that be weird? Hanging out with a girl?"

Humor dropped his controller into his lap, and his grin grew smaller. “I dunno. Does it matter?”

Clay bit her lip, and her hands shook as she considered her next words carefully. “Yeah, it does. I… I think I might be a girl.”

"Uh. Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Hmm." Clay broke eye contact and started staring resolutely at the TV screen, hanging onto her friend’s every breath, waiting for words that she was afraid might not come. "Alright."

"Alright?" She gave him a punch to the shoulder. "That’s all you have to say?  _Alright_?”

"Yeah, I guess so. I dunno. Hey, are we gonna play anymore, or should we just turn off the TV?"

"…whatever."

Clay lost the next round of the game, her hands still shaking as she tried to take deep breaths to calm down.

Next on the list was her mother. She started small, while they were eating breakfast, the TV blasting one of her mother’s soap operas in the background.

"Hey, Mom, when you were pregnant, what were you gonna name me if I was a girl?"  _Was_ this time, not  _were_ , though Clay doubted her mother would grasp the implications of the word choice, especially as she was still half-listening to some character angsting about his impending divorce.

"Hmm." Her mother chewed her spoonful of cereal before responding. "I never got that far, actually. Found out you were a boy early on, and that was that. Why?"

"Er." Her mind raced. No help from her mother, then. "I dunno."

A few minutes later, once the program reached a commercial break: “Did you want to have a boy when you had me, or…?”

"Well." Her mother laughed. "I kind of wanted twins, actually, one of each. It might’ve been nice to have a girl- I’ve still got all my old dresses and dolls in the attic somewhere, collecting dust- I should probably just give those away, maybe to your little cousin, she’s such a cutie! But you’re the best son I ever could have asked for, and I love you just the way you are, don’t you ever doubt that."

"Actually… I think you might’ve gotten your wish."

Her mother muted the TV and looked away from its glowing screen. Finally, after a few seconds of torturous silence, she spoke up. “…what are you talking about? I don’t understand.”

"Um, well…" She started sweating as anxiety set in, not just about the Big Issue but about stupid nitpicky things like her mother resenting her for the news getting in the way of her soap opera. Maybe she should’ve done it at a quieter time, made it the center of attention all along. Or on the other hand, maybe she should’ve tested the waters first, referred to herself casually as a girl rather than a boy and seen how her mother reacted. She had probably gone about it all wrong, and now her mother was going to hate her for not handling it right, if she wouldn’t have hated her already. But it was too late now. She’d brought the conversation to this point, and now she had to follow through.

"You always wanted a girl? Well, here I am. I  _am_ a girl, Mom. And I hope I can be the best daughter you ever could have asked for, and- and I hope you still love me just the way I am, and, and I…” She was shaking all over now, and a few tears were falling down her face, and her mind was filling with all the ways this would probably go dreadfully wrong, whether her mother would kick her out on the street or laugh in her face or blame the Internet and take away her computer or… 

Her mother turned the TV off and held her hand. “Oh, honey. I’ll always be here for you, okay? Whether you’re my son or my daughter. I’m still your mother, and that’s what mothers do.”

"Really?" Her voice was squeaky and broken now.

"Yeah. Just tell me what you need help with, okay?"

"Well, um, a-actually…"

She started taking the pills right away, but the skirts and dresses and frilly pink blouses sat in the back of her closet for weeks, unused. Somehow, miraculously, Humor and her mother seemed pretty okay with it, but she wasn’t sure whether she could bear coming out to the rest of the neighborhood.

Humor and her mother kept calling her “he” half the time, and even though they usually corrected themselves, their explanations that they’d known her as a guy for so long were accompanied by explanations that “Clay is a boy’s name”. She needed a new name, a real name for her real self, and fast. If the two people who accepted her couldn’t get over the gendered implications of her birth name, there was no way the neighbors could deal with it. She pored over the baby name sites with renewed vigor and found a few names that appealed to her, then started deliberating over which felt best. Chloe? Clara? Carly? They were all decent names, names that she felt she could adjust to, and yet…

Then she stumbled upon a name she’d never seen before. Cly. It was an unusual name, but she was okay with that. It was closer to her birth name than anything else she’d found- but, more importantly, it just felt  _right_. And her decision was made. It took her some time to adjust to turning around when that name was called, to filling out forms with one letter missing- most of the time she added in that A out of sheer muscle memory and had to go back and erase it- but it was so much better than being saddled with a name that just didn’t fit her true self.

And then, finally, Cly went outside dressed as the girl she knew she was. She wore pink, she carried around a purse to replace the pockets that her new clothes no longer had, she started wearing skirts and leggings, she got fitted for underwear that produced curves where there had been none and hid what needed to be hidden. She even tried some dresses on, though she quickly retired them from her wardrobe. And Cly brought back the long hair that had been taken from her so long, putting it in pigtails and ponytails and buns and combining them all on a whim, not caring how ridiculous her new hairstyles looked.

The neighbors gave her strange looks, spread rumors that she was doing it for attention, or that she got off on wearing girl clothes. The others avoided her more than ever. But Humor was still there for her, and he was the only one that had ever really mattered to her anyway. Let the others think what they will; at least she had a loving home and a good friend.

Cly went back to the books she loved in childhood, and she rediscovered the chapters of her history books talking about the voices. She’d always had a primal fear of them; the mere idea of being trapped in her body without control brought shivers down her spine, and while she enjoyed reading and writing stories about crazy adventures, she knew she’d much rather stay at home and live vicariously through the heroines of paper and ink than deal with the ugly underside of the world first-hand.

But now, her fears of the voices took a new angle. For one thing, the idea of being Champion, of having the whole world watching her and examining her life, scared more than excited her. But, more importantly, there was a clear gendered element to the voices. Camilla, the first girl ever chosen, mentioned the voices harassing her about her menstrual cycle. All the girls talked about the voices fixating on their bodies, especially their most feminine features, their chest, their butts. And the chosen ones all spoke of voices claiming that they “wanted the girl” or “wanted the boy” at the start. There was a clear gender binary to their decision-making process, and Cly had a sinking feeling that if they chose her, they would put her on the wrong side of that binary.

Then it happened.

She hoped it was just a lingering dream at first; it wouldn’t be the first time she’d had nightmares about the voices. But minutes went by, and it only grew more vivid, their screams clearer and louder with every passing second. Her body shook all over, because of fear as much as because of their jerky control.

But, as she circled her room, one pattern in their speech became clear.

_STREAMER-SENPAI WANTED THE GIRL! I KNEW IT!_

_Those who wanted the boy must be crushed lololol_

_BOOBIES_

_WE GOT SHORT SKIRT GIRL PRAISE HELIX_

_We should’ve kept with the boy you perverts_

_Dat booty tho_

_We got a boy last time, it’s only fair we get a girl now!_

It was, perhaps, the thing the voices could agree upon most.  _Girl. Girl We got the girl._

The idea of being controlled by the voices for weeks on end still made her heart race and the hair on her spine stand up. Cly didn’t want to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to lose Pokemon she loved or have to save the world or even become Champion. But, of all the things that had scared her about the idea of the voices’ control, at least this one hadn’t come true.

They treated her as they had all the other chosen girls, whether that meant using female pronouns or fixating on her booty.

They saw her as a girl, just another girl.

And that alone made the journey so much easier.


End file.
